


Scheming Face

by shadowstuff



Category: Nikolai Series - Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: M/M, two idiots attempting to scheme together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2019-12-30 06:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18310247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowstuff/pseuds/shadowstuff
Summary: Faced with an impending Fjerdan invasion, and hostile Shu Han, Ravka's odds of survival have never looked so bleak. Nikolai hatches a plan, and with that plan, Kaz's first visit to Ravka goes somewhat awry.As king, Nikolai Lantsov has almost gotten himself killed twenty-two times. This is the story of the twenty-third.Set in canonverse, after King of Scars.





	1. A Deal

In the third year of the reign of the King of Scars, Fjerda declared for Vadik Demidov and prepared to march on Ravka under the golden double eagle of the Lantsovs. Various undercurrents began to stir, and twenty-two attempts were made on the young king’s life. 

In the end, perhaps as a result of the twenty-two failed assassinations, or possibly because it was, in all honesty, prodigiously difficult to rescue a nation that was determinedly dragging itself underwater, Nikolai Lantsov vomited blood in the middle of a war council, before all of his stunned ministers, and collapsed. 

When the king retired to a royal hunting lodge on the outskirts of Os Alta to recuperate, the capital went off like a firecracker. 

“Bleh! He can’t even handle a few rabid, tree-hugging ice dogs? I bet he’s run away, the coward.” 

“How can you say that, after all he has done for this country?” 

“Humph, assassination attempt, what rubbish. He’s probably just spent one too many nights at Lazlayon.”

“Ai, and after barely three years of peace…”

On the outskirts of Os Alta, a subdued river crept through a narrow gorge. The green shadows of rustling willow trees crept across the windows of a hunting lodge, perched above its soaring cliffs. 

In a room filled with the mild, sweet scent of chamomile, the mainstay of the colourful rumours spreading across Os Alta was sprawled across a divan, languidly flipping through a scroll of parchment. It was the beginning of summer, but still a heavy furred cloak rested across his shoulders. In a brazier, a fire crackled happily away. 

“Mikhail, more tea please,” Nikolai said. He was rubbing his temples, apparently beset by a headache, when the servant knocked quietly and entered. 

“ _Moi tsar_ ,” Mikhail said, carefully refilling the cup of tea, keeping his gaze respectfully confined to the wooden floorboards before his feet. When Nikolai made no move to dismiss him, Mikhail risked a glance upwards, and found that the king had already fallen asleep in a lazy puddle of afternoon sun.

~

“I’m flattered by your enthusiasm,” Nikolai said, frowning faintly. “But it’s a little too late to produce an heir now, don’t you think?” 

Perched behind his desk, swamped in a heavy stack of animal furs, Nikolai looked pitifully wan, but that didn’t stop Zoya from wanting to throttle him.

“I don’t care if you fish an heir out of the True Sea, but you will write that decree today. I’ve been reminding you to do it for the past week, and Ravka cannot afford to be without a line of succession for much longer, especially given your condition.”

“Already plotting my death, are we?” Nikolai perked up. “How many artillery salutes are we planning for the state funeral?”

Zoya decided that talking to Nikolai when he was like this was only good for nursing a hernia, so after a few more inquiries into scattered affairs of state, she stood and bowed slightly. 

“I will return in the evening to collect the decree,” Zoya said, and left with a swish of her long blue _kefta._

Nikolai gazed after her thoughtfully, but his attention was quickly captured by a sheaf of papers by his elbow, which largely resembled the scribblings of drunk toddler. As he bent over the haphazard calculations and began to write anew, he called absently, “Mikhail, some tea?”

Nikolai worked his way steadily through his blueprints for refining the use of _dvigat’sya_ for the greater part of the afternoon. They had discovered _dvigat’sya_ accidentally—by fashioning two objects from two halves of the same raw material, Fabrikator craft could forge a connection between the hearts of both and have them move as one. The principle was fascinating, and so only when the first tendrils of dusk slanted into the room did Nikolai recall with a start that he quite valued his life.

With all the urgency of an elderly turtle, Nikolai got to his feet and shuffled back and forth across his study. He rifled through cabinets and drawers, pausing every few minutes to rest, and finally extracted a bronze tiger figurine, two unremarkable copper coins, and four keys. 

Three quatrefoil locks turned, two wooden panels slid apart noiselessly, and huffing with effort, Nikolai prised the Great Seal of the Realm out from beneath the floorboards. In the process, he accidentally jangled some bottles of the kvas he had stuffed there, and patted them apologetically.With the same incredible slowness, Nikolai shambled back to his desk, dipped a quill into ink, and began to write a decree. 

After sealing the decree in cinnabar-red and reburying the Great Seal in his makeshift wine cellar, Nikolai pinched the bridge of his nose, flopped down on his divan, and closed his eyes. 

Presently, the door to the study opened silently, and a figure slipped inside. Lightly, he approached the desk and seized the decree, eyeing the space beneath the floorboards where the Great Seal was hidden.

Nikolai did not stir. He lay still, his breaths shallow and stuttering, as if he were on the verge of expiring.

The intruder crept towards him, drawing his blade as he did so. For a heartbeat he stood motionless above the king. Then he slashed down and found the path of his knife deflected neatly by a slender metal nib of a quill. 

Nikolai was smiling up at him. His face was still bloodless, but gone was the slow, trembling weakness and and the tired, cloudy cast to his eyes. With the silver arc of the knife’s descent, something cold and serpentine had uncoiled in their hazel depths.

“Evening, Mikhail,” Nikolai said mildly.

Gradually, cries and sporadic bursts of gunfire began to issue from the grounds outside, broken by the howling of the wind. Inside the hunting lodge, Nikolai ducked underneath the swing of Mikhail’s knife, twisted away nimbly, and reached out below the divan. His fingers closed around the hilt of his rapier, and he met Mikhail’s next blow with a ring of metal on metal. 

The Lantsov sigil was a golden double eagle, but Nikolai fought like a serpent, cunning and lithe. He darted backwards, feinted left, and sent Mikhail’s knife thudding into the wall with a flick of his rapier. 

Nikolai tipped his head to the side, as if listening to the shriek of the wind, and rested the tip of his blade lightly against Mikhail’s throat.

“Good for you to send word for your fellow conspirators,” Nikolai said brightly. “Were they expecting you to deliver a forged decree naming Ivan Petrov as crown prince?” Ivan Petrov was the Lantsov pretender presently backed by Shu Han.

A blood vessel twitched in Mikhail’s temple. “When did you know?” Mikhail hissed.

“When you had the lids of my tea kettles infused with _he-ding-hong_ and believed you’d gotten away with it? After all the effort you spent trying to poison me, I could hardly refuse to play along.” 

“Snake,” Mikhail spat. 

“Kill me once, shame on you,” Nikolai shrugged. “Kill me, what, twenty-three times? Shame on me.”

Nikolai ignored the misplaced indignation that flashed through Mikhail’s furious eyes—after all, he and his cronies were hardly responsible for all of the attempts on Nikolai’s life—and deftly relieved him of his head. Moving quickly, he rummaged around the room, stuffing various lumpy bundles into his sleeve, and vaulted over the windowsill.

His personal guard was entangled with sixteen black-clad intruders, and on the perimeter of the hunting lodge, Zoya and a small unit of Second Army soldiers battled Shu Grisha warriors, their eyes almost completely black from _parem_. 

The Second Army fought in efficient teams of three, pivoting around one another with practiced ease, their hands weaving through the air in time to a song he would never be able to hear. At their head, Zoya stood alone, a whirlwind raging at her feet. The trees around her reeled, knocked askew like a pile of abandoned matchsticks, but the small mountain of tea kettles behind her remained neatly stacked. 

Slapping an attacker on the side of the head with the pommel of his rapier, Nikolai’s lips twitched. So she had taken him up on his suggestion after all. 

With unerring precision, Zoya shot him an ominous glare and sliced a hand in his general direction. As if to make good on her threat, the surrounding woods rippled and a Shu Squaller plummeted from the sky like a smashed fly. 

A dark figure detached itself from the forest shadows and darted across the grounds. Nikolai spared it a passing glance, and did a double take. “Is that Kaz Brekker?” 

Tolya sent a Shu assassin’s head and body flying in opposite directions. “What?”

“Have Tamar do the accounts again after this is over and see what we’re missing,” Nikolai said. Then, he added hopefully, “Maybe he took that ugly statue of Sankta Anastasia that old Popov gave me for my Saint’s day?”

As if nursing a grudge, there was a sound like rolling thunder, and the dam broke. 

* * *

Inej likely did not foresee that her invitation to Kaz Brekker would end up more or less amounting to treason, but Kaz Brekker had a knack for taunting fate, and he had never managed to scuff even the border of the word ‘well-behaved’. Two days after stepping foot into Os Alta, he was already padding through the woods of the royal hunting lodge, sleeves full of ill-gotten _lingzhi._

The royal hunting lodge was fairly well-guarded, particularly after Nikolai Lantsov moved there, ostensibly to regain his health. But _lingzhi_ commanded very respectable prices on the Shu Han black market, and that was reason enough for Kaz to burgle the King of Ravka. 

_Lingzhi_ liked to grow at the base of ancient trees, and the woods of the royal hunting grounds were amongst Ravka’s oldest, but _lingzhi_ were so rarely found outside Novyi Zem that no one had ever bothered to comb through them. Kaz, however, had nothing if not patience for making money, and so spent his excursion to Ravka amassing a small fortune.

He was in the middle of plucking the last of the knobbly little mushrooms—pity there were so few—when Nikolai decided to get himself assassinated.

Kaz had watched the battle with interest from a well-hidden vantage point in the woods, and he would have stayed hidden if not for a strange gust of wind. It had whistled past him, and almost immediately, the grass beneath his feet had begun to yellow. Belatedly, he had clamped a sleeve over his nose, but by then the ground was already spinning. 

Forced out of the cover of the trees, Kaz stole across the grounds, but his attempt to leave was interrupted by a Shu Heartrender. Over the distant roar of a swelling river, the assassin thrust a hand towards him, and tossed him into the gorge.

The river slammed into him, a wild thing irate at having been restrained, and threw him aside like so much flotsam. He tumbled head over heels, thrust deep below the surface by a fast-flowing current, so cold he could barely feel his own limbs. Kaz kicked out, trying to right himself and point his feet downstream, but the river had little patience for the antics of mortal men and sent a branch snapping against his head.

White noise. Kaz’s vision narrowed to a pinpoint, filling with black spots, and he bit down on his cheek before they could swallow him completely. The sharp coppery tang that filled his mouth forced the darkness back, but it retreated only to the edge of his consciousness, and with every heartbeat his head throbbed with sharp, dissonant pain.

Now fighting only to hold his breath, Kaz let the water sweep him along.

Just when the pressure in his lungs became almost unbearable, the current slackened. Choking, Kaz reared out of the water, snatching a breath before waters again closed over his head, drawing him into their cold embrace. 

What was that flash of gold he had seen, out there amidst the dark, churning waves?

There was a sharp tug around his middle, and he broke the water’s surface again. 

“Breathe!”

Drunkenly, Kaz blinked, trying to remember what it was like to draw air into his lungs. But he was floating now, hovering high above a body that wasn’t his, warm and safe. With calm, piercing conviction he felt that if he breathed, he would be thrust back, bones broken by a wrathful river and the piercing cold.

His cheek burned with a sharp slap. With a start, Kaz jerked upright, and the dense, white fog that shrouded his mind retreated somewhat.

Nikolai Lantsov was glaring at him, hazel eyes brimming with the fury of a summer storm. He had somehow contrived for the river to pin him against a jagged spar of rock that jutted out of the water, and he was clinging to it now, holding Kaz above a roiling river.

Nikolai snarled, “Breathe!”

Kaz sucked in air in a frantic gasp and immediately hunched over, coughing, as river water left his lungs and trickled from his mouth. Revulsion rose in the wake of his growing lucidity. Lantsov was the only thing between Kaz and the water, churning white at their waist, and still Kaz wanted desperately to shove him away. Clenching his fists, Kaz shuddered and swallowed the bile that soured his mouth. What was this but another kind of drowning?

“Can you swim?” Nikolai shouted above the driving rain.

Not trusting himself to speak, Kaz nodded, because he suspected that if he said otherwise, NikolaiLantsov would let go.

“I am going to push away,” Nikolai said. “We make for the left bank. Your left.”

With that, Nikolai struck out from the rock, swimming with one arm, his strokes fast and decisive. He was still holding tightly onto Kaz with his left arm.

Kaz attempted to help him sidestroke, but quickly found that he had vastly underestimated that peculiar gust of wind. A growing wave of nausea licked at the back of his throat with every stroke, until at last it was all he could do to close his eyes and keep out of Nikolai’s way. The odd, misplaced warmth he had felt earlier was returning, and as they inched towards the bank, the river’s savage strength seemed to dull. Its pull was almost lulling. With a sigh, Kaz felt himself drift.

“Brekker, I cannot hold you up,” Nikolai’s voice was tight, as if he were forcing the sound out.

Kaz’s eyelashes fluttered. 

“Stay… awake,” Nikolai said. Distantly, his thoughts sluggish and viscous as honey, Kaz realised that Nikolai was tiring. “Else, I buy Dregs… sell to Tante Haleen.”

Finally, something stirred inside him. “You don’t have the money,” Kaz whispered, his voice stolen by the cold. 

Nikolai managed a weary laugh. He was dunking Kaz into the river with every stroke now, too spent to hoist him above the water, and grimly, Kaz twisted numb fingers into Nikolai’s tunic. As if by silent agreement, Nikolai let go of his waist, redoubling his efforts to reach shore, while Kaz manoeuvred himself by increments so that he was resting against Nikolai’s back.

Still, despite his best efforts, Kaz realised with a twinge of irritation that his field of vision was again narrowing. Even the river’s thundering cry grew muffled, until he was conscious only of the cold and Nikolai’s pained, shallow breathing, which grew steadily more ragged as time wore on. And so, a heartbeat before they slammed into the bank, he felt Nikolai sigh, a low sound of relief.

Motionless, they hung there, clutching the gnarled tree roots that protruded from the riverbank, as the current parted around them and hurried downstream. 

“Safe,” Nikolai finally said, his voice almost as hoarse as Kaz’s own.

“Good,” Kaz agreed, and fainted.

~ 

Kaz drifted in and out of consciousness as snakes writhed through his bloodstream. His mouth was dry and hot, and an anvil struck angry, red sparks into his head. A feverish heat smothered him, leaching away any strength left in his wandering mind, and dazedly, Kaz wondered how it was possible for his eyelids to be so heavy, and yet for sleep be so far beyond reach.

Dimly, he was aware of the fact that someone was speaking to him, the cadence of their voice low and soothing. A cool hand rested on his forehead, chasing away some of the fire. Discomfort prickled distantly at his scalp, he felt as though he should pull away. But the promise of cold relief was too tempting for Kaz’s half-cooked brain to bear, and instead, Kaz pressed closer.

The faint, calming scent of chamomile curled around him, and then darkness swallowed him once more.

* * *

Under a rocky outcropping trailing moss and fern, Nikolai eyed the spluttering flames of his little campfire and wondered whether feeding it another branch would smother it entirely. Dubiously, he prodded the fire, and it spat petulant sparks at him. Shaking his head, Nikolai nudged his damp boots closer to the heat and winced when pain lanced through his fractured ribs.

Mournfully, he inspected the impressive bruising that mottled his chest. Why were there so many people throwing themselves at the crown? He seemed to have spent most of the last three years doggedly courting death. 

But the exercise with the _he-ding-hong_ had at least given him ample opportunity to take a pair of shears to his wild, unruly court. Absent-mindedly, he rubbed at a slender scar that lay over his heart. The Minister of Rites would be the first to go. The wretch had had the nerve to suggest that they dose some Fabrikators with _jurda_ _parem_ to pay off their debts to the Kerch. Nikolai had been magnanimous enough not to have lopped off his head on the spot, but did he really think Nikolai wasn’t aware of the fact that his wife was Mikhail’s aunt? 

When a rustle finally came from the corner where Kaz Brekker slept, Nikolai blinked, coming back to himself. He watched smoke twist into the air in slender grey ribbons, and waited patiently. 

“What happened to me?” Brekker spoke at last, in that rough rasp that sounded like desert sands, shifting in the wind.

“Poison. You should feel honoured. _He-ding-hong_ is a Shu Han national secret.”

Feeling vaguely guilty, Nikolai flicked a twig at his campfire. It had been his idea for Zoya to draw away the _he-ding-hong_ left in his tea kettles, dissolve the poison into the wind, and feed it back to the Shu. Brekker had likely been hit by an errant blast, and so indirectly, Nikolai had accidentally engineered his poisoning, but Nikolai certainly wasn’t telling him that.

“Has it been neutralised?” Brekker scrutinised him calmly. He was nestled in Nikolai’s oilskin cloak, which the river had generously spared, and did not look remotely grateful. 

Even completely still, Brekker gave an impression of coiled movement, a crow waiting to take wing. Nikolai bit back a snort. Who did Brekker think he was fooling with that cool self-possession? He had been flapping about on death’s doorstep like a beached whale not two hours ago.

“No. I’ve stopped its progress towards your heart, but that’s about it,” Nikolai said bluntly. Brekker did not seem surprised.

“What is it then?”

“What?” Nikolai feigned ignorance. 

“What do you want?” Brekker’s voice was flat.

“Oh, you wound me, Brekker. My heart is in tatters,” Nikolai said indifferently. “Given my generous, noble spirit, if I could cure you here and now, I would.”

Brekker certainly hadn’t been skulking around his backyard to pray for Nikolai’s good health, so while Nikolai had been guilty enough to fish him out of the river, he didn’t have enough conscience left over to play nursemaid. The impish light in Nikolai’s eyes grew hard. 

“I am not returning to Os Alta in the near future,” he said. “You have two choices. You could leave and attempt to find someone both willing and able to help you. In your current state, your eyes, nose, and ears will start oozing blood by the three hour mark, so you’d better be able to locate a cure within four hours.”

Brekker tilted his head, his dark eyes dancing with the reflection of the flames. “Or?”

“You could accompany me,” Nikolai said tepidly. “I have matters of state to attend to. Fortunately for you, I am a man of many talents.” 

He waved a spindly silver needle at Kaz. “I’d have to stick you full of needles every few hours. After a couple weeks, give or take, depending on how far the poison has spread, you should be good as new.”

Brekker fell silent. “And how good a medik are you?”

“A half-baked one,” Nikolai said, wholly unembarrassed. “But then you’d be surprised how terribly motivating regular assassination attempts can be.”

Brekker arched an eyebrow, and readily, Nikolai answered his unspoken question.

“Unless you have the flexibility of a Suli acrobat and an intimate knowledge of acupuncture points, you can’t do it yourself.”

“Aren’t you worried I’ll sell you out to the Shu in exchange for the antidote?” Brekker tipped his head to the side. 

“You could,” Nikolai acknowledged. “But I think you’d rather place your bets with the king who has already saved you twice than the hostile nation you’ve already managed to offend.”

With that, Nikolai returned to poking at his little fire. If Brekker wanted to hurl himself at death, Nikolai wasn’t going to stand in his way. But Kaz Brekker was a clever man, and because he was clever, Nikolai already knew his decision. 

After all, national secrets only stayed national secrets because they were wrought in blood. 

Sure enough, Brekker’s shoulders stiffened. Nikolai finally glimpsed an undercurrent of thinly veiled anger in his eyes. Brekker’s composure, which even nearly drowning had barely shifted, was slipping, and Nikolai pretended not to notice.

Woefully, Nikolai wondered why he was cursed with a saviour complex. He didn’t know Dirtyhands well. Even so, he could tell that Kaz Brekker had steel in his bones, and being in Nikolai’s debt would eat away at him like maggots at rotting wood. 

Nikolai was seriously considering taking pity on him and just slitting his throat, when Brekker spoke at last. “I offer you a deal.”

“Oh?” Nikolai’s ears pricked up.

“You mentioned you have matters of state to attend to,” Kaz Brekker said quietly. “To the north and south, Fjerda and Shu Han sharpen their claws. Ravka can ill afford more bloodshed. Your Highness intends to stop this war before it has begun, and I can help.” 

Nikolai regarded him with some interest.

“I will help,” Kaz said evenly. “In exchange for Your Highness’ assistance.”

Nikolai wanted to ask why Brekker was so sure he needed his help, but then again, Kaz Brekker _had_ managed to smash a hole through the outer wall of the Ice Court. He had a fair bit of respect for that alone. Silently, Nikolai studied Brekker’s pale, resolute face, and suddenly, he felt incredibly weary.

He didn’t have the kind of time to make more enemies than he had to.

“Very well,” Nikolai offered Kaz one gloved hand. “The deal is the deal.”

“The deal is the deal,” Kaz said. They shook, Kaz’s leather-clad fingers clasping Nikolai’s own. A smile flashed across Kaz’s face, like lightning darting through a thunderhead.

“Now, go to sleep,” Nikolai waved a hand at him. “What good are you to me with a hole in your head?” 

With that, he flopped backwards with a yawn.

As the fire burned low, Kaz Brekker said quietly, “I still don't understand.”

“Hmm?” 

“How come the King of Ravka to be trapped in a flooding river?” 

Nikolai blinked innocently at him.

“Judging by your control of the situation, you weren’t flung in, and you certainly did not jump in to save my inconsequential life,” Kaz said, and started when Nikolai bolted upright indignantly, hazel eyes blazing. 

“Why not?” Nikolai demanded. “Am I not the living embodiment of a hero?” 


	2. Collecting Strays

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all who left kudos/reviews! As this is my first story on AO3, I was a little nervous about posting, hence the huge gap between updates - which I am very sorry about - this chapter was ready long ago. Please bear with me!

Kaz awoke to the smell of burning. 

Nikolai was kneeling quietly before the remnants of the fire, tracing something in the ashes. His rakish air had disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only the stern, imperious bearing of a monarch. He appeared almost impressively regal, even if he was only glaring intently at the ground. 

Then Nikolai looked up with a grin, his eyes crinkling into half-moons.

“Are you hungry?” he said, and swept away his scribbles with a careless twitch of his sleeve.

Kaz sat up, drawing in a sharp breath as his multiple injuries protested, and peered at the charred, black thing Nikolai handed him. “What’s this?”  

“Food.”

Kaz arched an eyebrow, and then turned back to stare at the scorched wooden spit in his hands. “Or firewood?” 

“Charbroiled fresh rabbit,” Nikolai said seriously, without an ounce of sheepishness. “Seasoned with cherry wood smoke.” 

Kaz eyed him. “Did you charbroil your hair too?” 

Nikolai ran a hand through his hair, now an alarmingly muddy shade of brown. 

“I was originally attempting to make myself uglier,” he said blithely. “But I realize now that that would be doing the impossible.” 

Kaz’s eye twitched. Lowering his head, he studiously applied himself to the rabbit. 

“Are you ready?” Nikolai asked, when Kaz had finally choked down the last of Nikolai’s ground-breaking, teeth-shattering concoction. He was unrolling a slender bundle of silver needles. 

“Yes,” Kaz said, and dug his fingernails into his palms. 

Nikolai nodded at him. “You will have to remove your shirt. And your gloves.” 

Kaz’s heartbeat stuttered. Roughly, before the indiscernible quiver in his hands could give way to uncontrolled shaking, Kaz shrugged off his shirt and his gloves. With a touch of bleak self-mockery, he wondered how he had managed to make a practice of stripping in front of strangers.

Nikolai settled down beside him. The strangely familiar scent of chamomile filled his lungs, and already, Kaz felt dizzy. It was one thing to cling to Nikolai in the middle of a raging river. It would be another one entirely to let Nikolai push and prod at him like he was a wet clump of clay. A drop of cold sweat slid down his forehead. He had to do this. 

He had been all confidence and swagger when he had proposed the deal last night, but Kaz was only too aware of his own position. Nikolai had humored him by agreeing, maybe because he didn’t deign to squabble with a dying eighteen year-old with three fractured ribs and a concussion, but if he was right, even if he hadn’t been in the picture, Nikolai Lantsov had been prepared to throw himself down a gorge. 

The man burned with a sort of manic intensity that Kaz both scorned and grudgingly admired. With or without him, Nikolai’s plans would go on. There was nothing stopping Nikolai Lantsov from walking away except his misguided sense of honour, and Kaz had swum the murky depths of the Barrel long enough to know precisely how little honour was worth.

If Nikolai noticed how close Kaz was to snapping, he didn’t show it. His brows were furrowed in concentration, and sometimes his hand hovered lengthily over a pressure point, as if not completely sure where it was. But when he lowered the needle, he moved cleanly and quickly, never touching Kaz’s skin for a heartbeat longer than was necessary. Still, Kaz jerked slightly whenever the needle entered his skin. 

Nikolai’s touch was cold as ice. 

“Two left,” Nikolai said. He sounded as strained as Kaz felt, and dully, Kaz noted that Nikolai seemed to dislike skin contact almost as much as he did. He glanced at the faint black lines that crept over the back of Nikolai’s hands. There was a story there.

When the last needle sank in, the unruly tendrils of pain that writhed through his blood grew still. Kaz sighed, and the tension left his body so abruptly that he swayed, black spots dancing through his vision. Nikolai groaned and slumped bonelessly to the ground. 

“I am a goddamn genius,” he muttered to the dirt.

Once Kaz’s head stopped ringing, they set off through the Ravkan countryside. From the start, Kaz had suspected that Nikolai didn’t have an actual itinerary, and indeed they spent the next few hours looping in wide circles, occasionally taking detours when Nikolai caught sight of pretty waterfalls, or strange-shaped rocks. 

He seemed to take especial pleasure in chucking stones with vaguely canine silhouettes into the river. He also retrieved parcels of all shapes and sizes from inside hollow tree trunks and shallow caves like an oversized squirrel. Kaz watched of all this and said nothing. 

Kaz stepped lightly over a protruding tree root, his footfalls muffled by the thick carpet of pine needles that blanketed the forest floor. Streams of sunlight fell through the treetops, bringing out the gold in the budding spring leaves. It was quiet here, a clear emptiness unmarked by the rise and fall of human voices, the sounds of rolling dice and clinking mugs that rang even deep into the Ketterdam night. 

Ahead, he glimpsed Nikolai’s tall, lean profile through the trees. Even with no one but Kaz to see, his back was painfully straight. He moved with the easy grace and none of the entitlement of someone used to command. 

In Kaz’s short, eight-year career as the Barrel’s worst nightmare, he had come across a variety of colourful characters. Some people were about as opaque as stained glass. Others fancied themselves difficult to read, and so hid their thoughts behind a thin veneer of inscrutability, as if faking an air of mystery was the same as the real thing.  

But Kaz felt as though he could see through the depths of Nikolai’s clear hazel eyes—and that alone troubled him more than all of Jan Van Eck’s schemes put together, because it meant that Nikolai’s open, unclouded gaze was as enigmatic as Kaz’s own. 

Wrinkling his brow, Kaz closed his eyes, letting his mind fill with the sound of sighing leaves. 

After two more acupuncture sessions, as late afternoon light began to tint the leaves in gold, Nikolai glanced sharply to the left. “What is that?” 

Still trying to even out his breathing, Kaz lifted his head. He heard it too. A faint scrabbling sound, followed by the sound of splashing, as if a rat were trapped in a pail of water. By silent agreement, they slipped noiselessly around a copse of trees. In the depths of the Ravkan countryside, they found a lonely well, perched before a small plot of wheat. Their tall, green stalks rustled listlessly, as if trying to mask the increasingly frantic scrabbling coming from inside the well. 

Nikolai peered over its edge, and his eyebrows rose. “Hmm.”

The ashen face of a little boy, no more than four or five, gazed tremulously up at them. He was sitting in the bucket used for drawing water, his small frame shaking with residual and renewed fright. 

“What’s your name?” Nikolai said gently, once they had hauled him out. 

The boy shied away from them, pressing himself against the well as if trying to squeeze himself into the spaces between the bricks. He was so scrawny that for a moment it looked like he might succeed.

Nikolai pointed to himself. “I’m a pirate, and this is my butler.” 

Kaz barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes. 

The boy’s eyes darted from Nikolai to Kaz and back again, and then he ran. He made it two steps before lurching forwards and pitching face-first towards the ground. Nikolai caught him easily and scooped him up, murmuring softly as the boy shuddered and shook in his arms.

They left the well behind, following an uneven dirt path that led through the little wheat field, and crested a small hill. 

“Ah,” Nikolai breathed, a faint note of sadness. Kaz said nothing, his face expressionless. Together, they looked upon the bones of a burned village. With a mournful groan, a charred pole slowly toppled to the ground by their feet. 

The fire had mostly burnt itself out, leaving only the blackened shells of humble homesteads. Without a word, Nikolai deposited the boy lightly in Kaz’s unwilling arms and strode lightly into the nearest dwelling, seemingly oblivious to the cinders still spitting sparks below his feet.  

As he searched through each house, Kaz quietly walked down the row of homes, holding the boy as gingerly as he might a flash bomb. 

He heard nothing but birdsong and the faint crackle of crumbling wood. This was a small village, with no more than ten to fifteen buildings, but a fire of this magnitude would have taken days to die down, and only the low stone wall encircling the village had saved the surrounding forest from the flames. Nikolai would not find any survivors; they were surrounded only by embers. 

When he reached the end, Nikolai ducked out from inside the last cottage. He was alone. 

“Who did this?” Nikolai said. He voice was low and tight with rage.

“They had Grisha with them,” Kaz said quietly. “Squallers, at the least.”

Nikolai nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose. “To hide the smoke. Otherwise, the patrols would have caught sight of a fire this big, someone would have been sent to investigate, and I would have known.”

“An entire village,” Kaz said, observing Nikolai impassively. “Someone has something to hide.” 

Not many other motives prompted a hushed up, coldly premeditated extermination of this scale. Quietly, Kaz crumbled a lump of blackened wood in his fingers, and watched as the wind carriedthe ashes away. He didn’t say it outright, but the individual behind the massacre was probably Ravkan, and powerful, because it was far less likely that the Fjerdans or the Shu held a grudge against a nameless Ravkan village in the middle of nowhere.  

Evidently, Nikolai was coming to this same conclusion, because a troubled expression stole across his face, riming his features in frost. 

The nameless child had stopped quivering. He gazed silently back at the row of ruined houses, and his eyes were full of tears. Nikolai plucked him from Kaz, and before he could even open his mouth, Kaz interjected with all the keen premonitory instincts of a wild animal.

“No,” Kaz said. “We cannot take it with us.” 

“He isn’t an ‘it’,” Nikolai said, deliberately misreading the hard edge in Kaz’s words. “His name is Kolya.” 

Kolya, the diminutive of Nikolai. Kaz’s lips curled back in a sneer that held all the cold disdain of Fjerdan glaciers, but Nikolai barely seemed to notice. Instead, running a hand lightly through the boy’s tufty red hair, Nikolai whipped out a knife the length of the child’s forearm. The boy was still young enough to be distracted by parlour tricks, and in spite of his grief, his eyes widened as Nikolai twirled the blade in his long fingers, throwing off flashes of light that scattered across the trees like copper coins. 

“Someone wants him dead.” 

“Luckily for him, we don’t.”

“You are supposed to be on the run.” 

“Yes,” Nikolai said, smiling, but in that instant he had shed the roguish privateer and assumed the precise, military bearing of the king. “We are taking him with us.” 

His quiet tone brooked no argument. Unperturbed, Kaz gazed back evenly, the beginnings of an expectant, mocking smile touching his lips. But as quickly as it had appeared, the keen, piercing light left Nikolai’s eyes. He whispered something into the child’s ears, and Kolya giggled through his tears. The threat Kaz was waiting for did not come. 

Knitting his brows, Kaz gave Nikolai a long, considering look, and inclined his head slightly. 

“Any self-respecting townsfolk will think we’re slavers,” Kaz mused, as they headed into the woods and left the village behind. It was fairly atypical for two men to go traipsing through the woods with a child. 

“Oh. You could pretend to be my wife?” Nikolai suggested, completely oblivious to the heat of Kaz’s glare. 

“Or,” he went on, humming one of those infernal Ravkan lullabies whose lyrics probably trumpeted martyrdom and selflessness, “I could pretend to be yours?” 

Kaz discovered that it was possible to kill someone eighteen ways with his lock picks.

As Nikolai trotted on ahead and tried to feed Kolya some of his rabbit-flavoured charcoal, Kaz tipped his face up to the sky. It was still bright with the light of an early summer evening. For a long time, he stared at the emerging stars, as if committing them to memory. 

* * *

A small army of ducks waddled down the main street, a tawny tide of squabbling feathers, while their owner brought up the rear, leisurely swinging a cane as he herded them along. The soft lowing of cattle melded in with the cheerful murmur of running water. The bustling little town was the very picture of bucolic charm. It was big enough that travellers from far away wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, and yet sufficiently remote to have been largely disregarded by foreign spies.

Nikolai grinned brightly back at Kaz. “Don’t I have a good eye for property investment?”

Walking silently by his side, Kaz Brekker stuck out like a lone storm cloud in the middle of endless blue skies. Even arrayed in the plain cotton garments Nikolai had had the foresight to stash in the woods, he resembled a harmless farmer about as well as a cougar did a house cat. He was taller than Nikolai was, and Nikolai hoped that if anything, Kaz’s unnerving air would at least discourage people from looking closely enough to notice that Kaz’s sleeves ended a good two inches shy of his wrist. 

Nikolai needed to find him new clothes, and preferably give him a good thrashing. Maybe a black eye would help grind the haughtiness out of him? 

Kaz was holding Kolya serenely by the scruff of his neck. After Kolya had gnawed, drooled, and vomited his way all over the both of them, Kaz had exchanged his initial disgust for Saint-like calm. He kept his gaze blank, as if he were trying his best to forget that he was stranded in the middle of nowhere with two thoroughly distasteful companions.

Kolya tugged insistently on Kaz’s sleeve, and the latter drifted vacantly towards a kindly old lady selling strawberries. While their backs were turned, Nikolai pressed a palm against his eye and blinked away reflexive tears. 

When Genya had passed him the eyedrops, she had warned him half-jokingly that he might go blind. Now, trying to rub away the blurriness in his vision, he was beginning to suspect that she had meant it. They stung like salt water.

Still teary-eyed, Nikolai sidled up to the both of them. 

“Would you like some strawberries?” he said benevolently, gently picking out a fat, plump strawberry and holding it out to Kolya. 

Dignity forgotten, a long string of drool dangled from the corner of Kolya’s mouth and he reached out for the strawberry, eyes wide and beseeching. Grinning heartlessly, Nikolai snatched his hand back. 

“I have no money!” he sang, and he wasn’t just talking about the strawberries. Kolya’s bottom lip trembled, but he remained staunchly silent. 

Nikolai sighed softly. The boy still hadn’t spoken a single word since they had found him. 

Kaz was still doing his best to stare right through the both of them, but as if registering the threat of imminent tears, he stirred and passed a few copper coins to the old lady with a soft note of thanks. He stuffed the strawberries unceremoniously into Kolya’s hands, rolling his eyes when Nikolai immediately helped himself to some, and casually struck up a conversation with a roadside cobbler.

Kaz’s Ravkan wasn’t very good, but he was fluent enough so long as the conversation was in standard Ravkan and stuck strictly to uncomplicated concepts like violence and the weather. The cobbler’s Ravkan was harsh with the dialect of the Ravkan south, so he doubted Kaz understood even half of what the cobbler was saying. He was asking for him, and so Nikolai munched shamelessly on Kolya’s strawberries and listened closely.  

“… good harvest,” the cobbler nodded. “Not that it’ll matter when the Fjerdans kill us all.” 

“Have you no faith in the king?” Kaz said, his tone an effortless blend of faint indignation and adoring naiveté. He was the perfect picture of a righteous Ravkan citizen.

“Tch, the king?” the cobbler said, slamming a hammer into the sole of a shoe as if imagining it were Nikolai’s head. “What king runs away to a hunting lodge when the Fjerdans come knocking on our front door? Heard he’s missing now. Long time coming, if you ask me, he nearly popped his clogs in court a while ago. Blood everywhere.” 

Nikolai blinked. Trust Tolya to give any story a melodramatic flair.

“Pity that,” a maiden said, overhearing. She sighed tearfully, tapping her basket of apples. “He was so handsome!”  

Nikolai nodded approvingly. 

“Really?” Kaz said to the cobbler, allowing worry to creep into his voice. “Who is the new king?” 

Mildly impressed, Nikolai nibbled on a strawberry seed. Kaz Brekker was keeping pace with the drift of the conversation merely from having heard “king”, “missing”, and “blood” said in the same breath. 

“Adrian? Andrei? Why does it matter?” the cobbler shrugged. “Our lives go on, no matter who sits on that throne.”

As they wandered away from the town center, Kolya’s adorableness, which Kaz had yet to fully appreciate, began drawing some doting glances from passing townsfolk.

“What a lovely child!” a young countrywoman called out to them, looking up from her washing. She looked at Nikolai, then Kaz, and a bemused expression crossed her face. 

“Yours?” she said, directing her question to the space between the two of them.

“Yes,” Kaz said, because Nikolai looked lost in thought, and sighed. It was a single word, and yet he hadn’t lied with such a spectacular lack of finesse in years. Kolya’s bright red hair resembled exactly neither of them. 

Clearly, this did not escape her, because her eyebrows rose. After a short pause, she nodded knowingly. “I see. Oh, you two must be so happy together. Good on you! ” 

Kaz smiled politely at her in wordless misery. 

“Did she say something?” Nikolai said a few minutes later, looking up at him. His brow was faintly furrowed, as if he was finding it difficult to focus on Kaz, and silently, Kaz filed this observation away. He was still unused to those odd grey-brown eyes. They looked turbid in the sunlight, as though someone had swirled a basin of river water, sending up clouds of silt. 

“Nothing important,” Kaz said shortly. 

They turned into a crooked lane lined with fir trees. Under their cool, patchwork shadows, Kaz caught his first glimpse of Nikolai’s idea of property investment. 

“How enlightening,” Kaz marvelled. “I wasn’t aware that the state of Ravka’s coffers was quite so bleak.” 

Nikolai’s cottage, much like his country, appeared one good thunderstorm away from falling apart. Its worn, grey walls were slanted at a slight angle, as if leaning on one another for support. The little plot of land it sat on was being slowly and eagerly reclaimed by a jungle of weeds. A crumbling stone wall ringed the whole thing, ideal if one wished to keep out nothing larger than a particularly fat weasel. 

“It has a quaint sort of charm,” Nikolai said cheerily. He strode up the path to the cottage and gave the door a gentle push. It promptly fell off its hinges. 

They stared at it.  

“It has character,” Nikolai decided.


End file.
